NBC-Universal Entertainment’s Lauren Zalaznick, head of cable’s Bravo network, delivered this brilliant, thought-provoking talk at TED Women on the ways television mirrors our national psyche. In it, she discusses the findings of an unusual study that correlated five decades’ worth of data about what we were watching with what was going on around us in a larger societal sense.

Zalaznick is someone who obviously must think a hell of a lot about these matters, yet the peanut gallery on YouTube has been unkind to her thesis, as if she was presenting it as hard science, which she’s not. Yes, there’s a fair amount of educated conjecture going on here, but there are a lot of valid directions she opens up that research like this could take. I, for one, found this talk fascinating (It would make a great book, too).